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Parents, Oh how much ought you to be continually devising for the good of your children! Often devise how to make them “wise children”; how to give them a desirable education, an education that may render them desirable; how to render them lovely and polite, and serviceable in their generation. Often devise how to enrich their minds with valuable knowledge; how to instill generous, gracious, and heavenly principles into their minds; how to restrain and rescue them from the paths of the destroyer, and fortify them against their peculiar temptations. There is a world of good that you have to do for them. You are without the natural feelings of humanity if you are not in a continual agony to do for them all the good that ever you can. It was no mistake of an ancient writer to say, “Nature teaches us to love our children as ourselves.”

Resolved —

At the birth of my children, I will resolve to do all I can that they may be the Lord’s. I will now actually give them up by faith to God; entreating that each child may be a child of God the Father, a subject of God the Son, a temple of God the Spirit-and be rescued from the condition of a child of wrath, and be possessed and employed by the Lord as an everlasting instrument of His glory. (See Newsletter Link)

The Heresy that Wouldn’t Die - Christian History

The Heresy that Wouldn’t Die
Though Gnostic sects faded in the early church, Gnostic ideas have had a long shelf life.
by Philip Jenkins
from Issue 96: The Gnostics Hunger for Secret Knowledge

This world is not my home. As it stands, that statement reflects the views of a great many orthodox Christians, but a Gnostic would take it much further. From a Gnostic perspective, the material world is not just fallen but an utterly flawed creation, beyond redemption. God—or at least, the good, true God—certainly does not work in history. Escape is only available to the small minority who know, who recognize the need for liberation, which lies within. Wisdom, Sophia, is for the spiritual, the elite, and distinguishes them from the gullible herd of humans mired in the material, the victims of cosmic deception. They will remain asleep, while the true Gnostic is awakened.

Gnosticism has never gone away, however much some modern scholars lament the suppression of its hidden gospels in the late Roman Empire. The main themes survived, for instance, in the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which explains how the world was created through the fracturing of the vessels into which the divine goodness was poured. In addition to seeking their own mystic ascent to God, believers also pledge themselves to achieving tikkun olam, the restoration of the broken world.

Within Christendom too, the fact that Christian states officially suppressed heresy just drove these ideas beyond the frontiers, into regions like Mesopotamia and Armenia. Gnostic and dualist ideas thrived across large parts of Asia in movements like the Paulicians and the Manichaeans, who taught the children of light how to liberate themselves from the evil god of this world.

Occasionally, these ideas were reimported into Europe, most famously in the Cathar or Albigensian movement, which was suppressed by a near-genocidal crusade in 13th-century France. The Cathars followed the old Gnostic ideas faithfully, offering full salvation to the “perfect” who absolutely renounced the world. These old-new movements relied chiefly on the Christian gospels, interpreting the parables in their own distinctive way. Like the early Gnostics, though, they also wrote their own scriptures, such as the Book of John the Evangelist. (”Then did the Contriver of Evil devise in his mind to make Paradise, and he brought the man and woman into it.”)

Living in a Christian-ruled society, later Gnostics defined themselves against the church and its doctrines, which provided a foil for the truly spiritual. The Cathars rejected the Roman Catholic Church as, literally, the synagogue of Satan. Catholics followed the deluded God who had created the abomination of the world in which we live and whose bloody misdeeds are chronicled in the Old Testament. Ordinary Catholic believers were the sheep, in the sense of being docile, ignorant, and uncomprehending.

Good article from Darrell Bock. Interesting idea. I would like to do/see more research on this topic.

Roots Matter - Christian History

Roots Matter
Defending the faith in today’s cultural climate means not only knowing our Bible but also knowing our history.
by Darrell L. Bock
from Issue 96: The Gnostics Hunger for Secret Knowledge
It used to be that when I taught class and came to Gnosticism, eyes glazed over and clock-watching began. Mentioning Gnostics in church just never happened. The digital age of niche TV and “History Channel” documentaries has changed all that. The Gnostics are making prime time appearances and have agents. I get questions about them constantly.

We are now in a period when it is not enough to know only about the Bible. The apologetics of the past is no longer adequate. Today’s questions involve not only how the Bible came to be, but even if there was originally such a thing as orthodoxy. It is a crucial question. Christians need to know a lot more about the second century. Roots matter, especially in the founding of a movement.

One question often raised is how there could be “orthodoxy” when there was no functioning New Testament until sometime between the late second and the fourth century. Doesn’t this mean that Christianity could and did go in all directions until the canon nailed down doctrine? The claim is that our history is distorted because winners write the history. My reply is that in this case the winners deserved to win, because their faith had a theological rootedness that the Gnostics’ did not.

Tags: church history gnostic orthodoxy christianity bock

Good article reminding us again of our real treasures!

Life Action Revival Ministries::“A Double Grace”: John Calvin on Justification and Sanctification

Good article to help discipline your Reading Habits

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Life Action Revival Ministries::Deliberate Reading

Deliberate Reading 

Written by Brian G. Hedges   

Great leaders are usually disciplined readers. Reading widely and reading well serve the mind as good nutrition and aerobic exercise serve the body. Too many church leaders have flabby brains.

As Os Guinness says, we have fit bodies but fat minds.[1] The primary remedy for our mental obesity is deliberate reading, which involves deliberate choices as to when, what, and how we read.

Life Action Revival Ministries::Why Read the Puritans?

Written by Brian G. Hedges   

  The Puritans were the 16^th century English Protestants and their successors in 16^th and 17^th century New England, and it was their concern for church reform and spiritual renewal that earned them the originally derogatory epithet puritan. Unfortunately, most people associate the term with legalism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and witch hunts, thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

WORLD Magazine | Weekly News, Christian Views

Remember the Alamo

RELIGION: Is the battle for the Bible really over?

It was America’s bicentennial year, but not all the fireworks were about the nation’s birthday. That same year, Harold Lindsell, then editor emeritus of Christianity Today, lit a fuse of his own with the publication of The Battle for the Bible.

Lindsell’s book was an exposé of a spreading liberalism within evangelicalism—and with special reference to the Southern Baptist Convention. “At this moment in history the great bulk of Southern Baptists are theologically orthodox and do believe that the Word of God is inerrant,” he advised. Even still he warned that if Southern Baptists committed to inerrancy did not act soon, “the rougher the battle will be, the more traumatic the consequences, and the less obvious the outcome in favor of historic Christianity.”

Southern Baptists did not hesitate. In 1979 they elected Adrian Rogers, pastor of the famed Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, as president—and the battle was joined. What later became known as the “Conservative Resurgence” in the SBC began in earnest, and conservatives eventually captured the boards of all of the denomination’s national institutions. The “Battle for the Bible” was won by those who insisted that biblical inerrancy is so vital to the health of the church that it was worth dividing the Convention over the issue if necessary.

This week the Southern Baptist Convention convenes for its annual meeting in San Antonio. The last time the Convention met here, the voting “messengers” elected Jerry Vines of Florida as president—by 692 votes out of 32,727 cast. Those were days of constant controversy and contested elections.

This year’s convention will be different. SBC President Frank Page, a prominent South Carolina pastor, is expected to be elected to a second term without opposition. Page represents a new generation and is marked by a low-key style. There will be no long lines of buses from across the Convention idling outside the convention center, waiting for decisive votes to be cast.

So much has changed. Adrian Rogers died in 2005. Jerry Vines retired last year as pastor of Jacksonville’s First Baptist Church.

The SBC’s seminaries, now under the control of conservative trustees and presidents, enroll a record number of young ministers, drawn to the conservative theology. But most of these students were not born when Adrian Rogers was elected in 1979. They were toddlers when the Convention made history in San Antonio in 1988. They are the generation without a living memory of the controversy and what was at stake. To them, the election of Jerry Vines in 1988 is almost as remote as the struggle of Davy Crockett and the brave Texans at the Alamo.

A group of younger pastors and bloggers is now openly asking the question, Is the “Battle for the Bible” over? Some go further, arguing that the theological issues are settled, health has been returned, and the SBC should move on from theological preoccupations. Are they right?

The SBC is certainly in no danger of an organized liberal takeover. The more liberal elements have largely moved on to other groups and have little to do with the SBC. There will be no re-match on the question of biblical inerrancy in San Antonio.

Still, all is not well. The denomination is losing many of its young people, especially at the crucial transition between adolescence and adulthood. New controversies have emerged even as older fissures have been reopened. A generation that was playing Little League as the “Battle for the Bible” raged now includes some who loudly claim that the Conservative Resurgence has gone too far.

Not hardly. The incipient controversies of the present serve to remind Southern Baptists of what was at stake when we last met in San Antonio—and of where we would be if the Convention had headed in a very different direction. The issue of biblical inerrancy is as important today—and as in need of defining and defending—as it was then.

Southern Baptists will do well to remember what every Texan remembers when reminded of the Alamo: There are some battles worth fighting, some stories worth remembering, and some causes that never die.
— R. Albert Mohler Jr.

You have to be kidding me…

The Blasphemy Challenge

MARKS OF CHURCHES MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BY BROTHER CLOUD

I should make all my Romans students read and comment on this post.

Pyromaniacs: Resurrection not essential? (More of Those Wacky Academics!)